The Nomenclature of Pain

in this place, 
nothing carries the miracle of grace.

your heart is a wilting rose 
that craves to taste the sun 

every day, you crack your chest open 
with the sole wish to find any ray of light.

your favourite songs struggle to march 
into your veins and replace the numbness in your soles 

and so you turn to the blade
till your bones become elastic. 

every perforation on your body is a crude attempt 
to decipher what language your skin has always spoken, 

a different way to brand yourself with a familiar heat
and tattoo hope on anything that escapes from your lips. 

perhaps then, what is fading in between your ribs 
can wear the colours of the wind 

and know what it is to bloom and 
give your 20-year-old pain another noun. 

but to be lost is to reimagine yourself as a compass 
so you make your fire, and you let its embers burn 

you—that is one way you know to open your windows 
to usher more than just darkness in,

know to drown your shadows and watch them 
dissolve into the night—that is how you always 

morph into the moth that dances around your lantern 
every night with hopes that it finds wonder inside this glass.

Note: Inspired by Animashaun Ameen’s Nigerian poetic lineage.